With the expansion of cellular, WIFI™, cable, fiber, and other Internet access points and the growing ubiquity of Internet-capable mobile devices, messaging systems have expanded their reach and influence in areas of social/professional networking, real-time collaboration, events, and general communication. Previously, bandwidth and hardware limitations made it difficult or even impossible to share large amounts of data in real time. Today's messaging systems include peer-to-peer and subscriber-based sharing of data and information seamlessly among a variety of different devices.
Unlike the limitations of early messaging systems such as Short Message Service (SMS), messaging systems are now capable of receiving and propagating video, audio, images, and uniform resource locators (URLs) of various different content among users. Providing access to this myriad of content in a consistent and meaningful way is non-trivial. The interests of users, the platform, and content providers must all be considered. A fragmented experience across devices, between users, and among content hosted between different providers can lead to a frustrating and difficult user experience.
Furthermore, the content of the SMS may be limited to displaying only static contents. However, messages that facilitate interactions among various parties may be useful.
While the flow and sequence diagrams presented herein show an organization designed to make them more comprehensible by a human reader, those skilled in the art will appreciate that actual data structures used to store this information may differ from what is shown in that they, for example, may be organized in a different manner; may contain more or less information than shown; may be compressed and/or encrypted; etc.
The headings provided herein are for convenience only and do not necessarily affect the scope or meaning of the claimed embodiments. Further, the drawings have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be expanded or reduced to help improve the understanding of the embodiments. Similarly, some components and/or operations may be separated into different blocks or combined into a single block for the purposes of discussion of some of the embodiments. Moreover, while the various embodiments are amenable to various modifications and alternative forms, specific embodiments have been shown by way of example in the drawings and are described in detail below. The intention, however, is not to limit the particular embodiments described. On the contrary, the embodiments are intended to cover all modifications, equivalents, and alternatives falling within the scope of the disclosed embodiments as defined by the appended claims.